It's seven months since the Sun's Tom Newton Dunn promoted "Hijacked Labour", a far-right hit-list based on neo-Nazi sources, and the British media is still maintaining near-complete omerta about it. The HL website now has an interesting message: 1/
hijackedlabour.com
hijackedlabour.com
To the best of my knowledge, this piece for the Guardian website by Daniel Trilling (an outside contributor) is still the only time Newton Dunn's dalliance with the far right has been so much as mentioned in a mainstream publication. 2/
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
I wrote this for Tribune at the time: I wanted to help any journalist who didn't have time to pore over the chart in detail, so I gave detailed directions for exactly where you could find the links to neo-Nazi sources on the "Hijacked Labour" chart. 3/
tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/the-su…
tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/the-su…
BTW, the original chart had already been taken down when I wrote this, but it was archived on the Wayback Machine. That link doesn't appear to be working now: I don't know why, so I won't speculate—does anyone know if there's a still-functioning link to the chart online? 4/
I'm fairly convinced this is why the code of silence has been maintained: there's absolutely no way you can spin your way out of using "Aryan Unity" as a source—the clue is in the name—so TND's pals just have to pretend they didn't notice what he did. 5/
One of those pals in action—someone who's been very vocal on the subject of antisemitism, unless it involves one of her cronies channeling his readers to a group called "Aryan Unity", in which case her well of opinion appears to run dry. 6/
"A total blind spot on AS", eh? A felicitous turn of phrase, really. We can all agree, I'm sure, that a "total blind spot on AS" is a deplorable thing for an influential public figure to have. Times Radio will be discussing TND's "blind spot" very soon, no doubt. 7/
It wasn't just Aryan Unity, either—"Hijacked Labour" also cited an article from "The Millennium Report" that presented George Soros as the "anti-national identity bankroller" funding "Islamist migration and Antifa violence". Bark, bark, bark! 8/
The MR website said that "9/11 was a Mossad job" and claimed that Israel would carry out "false-flag attacks" on behalf of “the global crime syndicate known as the International Banking Cartel”. I believe that's what we might call a "trope"—or just raving antisemitic lunacy. 9/
It's not that Tom Newton Dunn stumbled across an otherwise splendid website that unfortunately included a few dodgy links. The whole thing was an exercise in deranged ultra-right paranoia and incitement—the kind of thing that got Jo Cox killed and other Labour MPs targeted. 10/
A fairly prominent right-wing commentator, Giles Udy, explicitly defended the use of neo-Nazi sources with the comment "'Hitler noted the sun was shining' doesn't become untrue because he reported it." 11/
Udy, author of the imperishable work "Labour and the Gulag", hasn't seen fit to retract his praise for "Hijacked Labour", or his wholehearted endorsement of neo-Nazi websites as legitimate sources for political reporting. 12/
We're often told that British journalism has a sacred code: "dog does not eat dog." In this case, Newton Dunn set the dogs on a list of people that included some well-known journalists, yet he faced no backlash from his colleagues. 13/
No single incident sums up the poisonous nature of the anti-Corbyn, anti-left campaign in British politics better than this. Despite their apparent endorsement of "Sir Keir", I doubt we've heard the last from the evil spirits respectable journalists were happy to summon. 14/
And like that, it was gone! Oh well, there's always screen caps.
Here's the original context for those screencaps:
No longer entirely in my purview, I must admit.
Remember, according to Udy, Corbyn and his supporters are basically the same as Hitler, but Hitler himself—or his latter-day disciples—can be considered a reliable source on the Left, as long as he agrees with what they say.
dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…
dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…
